


Step Away

by mutterandmumble



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: But that’s what it is, Character Study, Gen, Gross Overuse of the Word Ordinary, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Introspection, It’s sloppy, Not Beta Read, Pre-Canon, Self-Hatred, Wholly Unecessary Focus On Numbers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 15:43:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17983973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutterandmumble/pseuds/mutterandmumble
Summary: So the way that she sees it, she fits nowhere. She’s got a history, she’s got a life and she’s got something approaching agency, but she’s empty in the end. She stands strange among the normal, and normal among the strange. She is no-good.





	Step Away

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in a day and edited it mainly at 4 in the morning, so quality-wise, I don’t actually know where this falls.
> 
> In other news, this marks the first fic that I’ve written outside of my usual fandoms. It was an experience, honestly, and by that I mean I wrote almost all of it in one session after I just got done thinking that I would never finish anything ever again

It’s been a long stretch of days for Vanya Hargreeves. She’s woken up in the morning, and she’s gone to bed at night, and she’s woken up in the morning, and she’s gone to bed at night, and she’s-

 

She’s really nothing worth speaking of. She’s done nothing of worth, nothing of note, nothing groundbreaking or world-shaking or extraordinary.  Every day she wakes up, she takes her pills, she eats breakfast, and she carries out any number of menial tasks and any given order. She doesn’t deviate. She doesn’t try to break the mold.

 

She’s been doing these same things for a long, long time. Going on thirty years- thirty years, and she’s still aimless. Because Vanya Hargreeves is an anomaly; an abnormality in a family of abnormalities, the sort of person unlucky enough to be ridiculed for normalcy. She’s got plainness settled in her bones and blandness coloring her skin. She’s got a deep-rooted insecurity, and a bottle of pills, and big feelings that she keeps small. She’s got a dysfunctional family that’s been long scattered to the winds.

 

She’s gotten nothing done, in all of her years. She’s lived a life of wavering uncertainty, where she’s gone back and forth between surety and confusion, between anger at what’s been said to her and sadness at what she has never heard. She’s been stuck, left out of the loop, knows only seven things for certain: One is up on the moon, Two is angry with her, Three is better than she could ever hope to be, Four is god knows where, Five is god knows  _ when _ , Six is long, long gone, and Seven is ordinary.

 

Ordinary. Plain. Painstakingly simple.

 

Vanya’s has a lot of time to think. She knows that that’s not always true- seven is good, sometimes. Seven-Seven-Seven on a slot machine is borderline euphoric, for some; there are seven wonders of the world. Seven is a lucky number. There are seven notes in a diatonic scale. Seven days in a week. Seven continents.

 

For a while, Vanya thought that if seven was good, she could be too. Maybe, she would never be exceptional; but she could be happy. Seven was a good number, and she  _ was  _ Number Seven, in spirit, mind, and body, so maybe, maybe she could be good as well.

 

Then she broke a mirror. That was seven years bad-luck, piled on top of twenty-odd years of much, much worse luck. 

 

And Vanya Hargreeves, Number Seven, remembered that there are seven deadly sins to the seven heavenly virtues, and she can name all of one set but not the other. 

 

So the way that she sees it, she fits nowhere. She’s got a history, she’s got a life and she’s got something approaching agency, but she’s empty in the end. She stands strange among the normal, and normal among the strange. She is no-good. 

 

And now, she is alone.

 

It’s been years and years since she’s been outright  _ told  _ that she’s ordinary, years and years since she’s let it cut right to her core, but the sting of the knowledge is still there. When she goes to practice, when she walks through the city, when she coaxes herself up and out of bed to show her face anywhere at all, she hears that voice in the back of her head whisper  _ ordinary, ordinary, ordinary. _

 

Ordinary, unexceptional. Unexceptional, uninspiring. Uninspiring, unfeeling. Unfeeling, uncaring.

 

When she’s puttering around all day, doing what she must to survive, she is somewhat lukewarm. Sort of upset. Maybe a little unhappy. She might hurt a bit- she’s not wholly sure. She might hurt a lot. She might have tried to lessen the gut-wrenching peals of discomfort that twist her stomach into knots and make her nauseous at night, she might have tried to cajole herself into something approaching happiness, she might have failed.

 

She might have written her book hoping to step outside of the confines that had been so carefully laid before her. A book about her life, about her experiences when she was normal around those who were anything but, the sort of book that burns bridges in a kerosene fueled, match-struck blaze. The sort of book that doesn’t hold back. She wrote about what little she felt, about her relationship with her siblings, about the empty life they lived with their father. With that book, she pushed back the best that she could against anything anyone had ever said to her. Her father told her that she was ordinary; she did something unexpected. Her siblings told her that she was ordinary; she tried to make the word her own. 

 

And the book came out. And she achieved something approaching success.

 

And the hype faded. It took her with it.

 

So today, as she has done every day before, Vanya wakes up to find herself listless. She takes her pills. She eats breakfast. She goes to practice.

 

Practice is good. She shows up five minutes early, violin case clasped in hand and her mind a comfortable fuzz of dull emotion. Nothing too happy, nothing too sad. Perfect. She plays well- her intonation is impeccable, her bowing strong, her sound rich and full and resonant. She wears the pride of competence on her sleeve, lets it weigh heavy in her bones until she’s feeling warm and comfortable and almost viciously at ease.

 

She leaves practice that day content with herself. She’s done what she can; she’s done enough. So as she walks along the streets and back to her apartment, her mind is set loose to wander to the tall buildings, and the tall people, and the cars whizzing past. When she feels like a part of something, like right now, among the movement of the city, she thinks that being ordinary might not be so terribly bad. She could make something of herself in the concrete jungle. She could be someone strong, someone notable- her hair, matted to her head by the light drizzle could be a pith helmet, the violin case in her hand a rifle, the honking and screeching of traffic the buzzing of mosquitoes. If she breathes softly, and she concentrates, then the lampposts could melt into trees and the umbrellas sprout upwards and spread into palm leaves. The gravel on the asphalt could be sand, and the weeds clawing up between the cracks in the sidewalk vines. 

 

Vanya could be strong, if she tried. Vanya could be her completely, utterly, painfully ordinary self, but still be capable. She could still be safe.

 

Or she could be a woman, walking alone in the rain, with nothing but her violin at her side. It’s not really her decision.

 

She arrives at her apartment, eventually. One way or another. Her jacket is hung up by the door, the key following; the boots are discarded carelessly, and the violin placed down with as much care as she can afford. Then she picks it right back up, because she’s got nothing else planned for the day, and if she stops for a moment than she starts to fall apart. 

 

She opens the case, and out comes the violin. It’s lovingly polished, dark wood and shining steel strings and soft, curved edges standing in contrast to her chapped hands and chewed nails. The bow comes next, heavy as she tightens it and swings the violin up to rest on her shoulder. With a deep breath, she slides her eyelids closed and begins a simple warm-up piece. The bow slips over the strings on her exhales, gliding easily as she falls into the familiar rhythm. Back and forth, back and forth. Exhale, shift,  _ crescendo.  _

 

Next is a flurry of sixteenth notes, careful and controlled in a way that’s so dutifully uniform it’s near poetic; this piece, this practice session is as dull as she is. There’s no pull or push at the notes, nothing outside of what there’s supposed to be, no spring or tension or flight. She’s evoking nothing but everyday life.

 

The sixteenth notes bleed into eighth notes, into slurs and trills and  _ decrescendos  _ as her playing dies out.  _ Ordinary, ordinary, ordinary _ , she thinks with each pluck of a string. Three more bowings, and it’s come to a close.

 

She’s not quite done yet. She needs her sheet music for the next one, so she pulls it out and sets it on the stand and waits for a moment, in the watery light streaming through the windows, and listens to the soft  _ pitter-patter  _ of rain against the panes of glass.  _ Plick, plick, plick,  _ little bits of water, little  _ staccatos  _ that run down and slur into each other. Perfectly normal. Utterly ordinary. The sheet music on the stand is black-and-white, covered in pen-marks and little notes to herself. Perfectly normal. Utterly ordinary.

 

She lifts the violin, raises her bow in a graceful arc, and again plays.

 

Her eyes are open, now, scanning each bar and measure a split second before her fingers make the jump along the strings. A, F, G, shift. Ordinary.  _ Piano  _ here, _ forte  _ there. Dull. 

 

She makes a mistake. Frustration flood in from a tiny corner in her mind, leaking through the cracks and curling muted around her shoulders. Three more measures are run impeccably before she again messes up. The frustration tries to rear its head; the rest of her keeps it tamped down.

 

Her thoughts, though, exhibit no such restraint and fly from the music to frustration, to her family and to annoyance. 

 

She saws harder at the strings, letting the smooth sounds becoming disturbed by scratching, ugly screeches. Her anger rises, locked away in some quiet corner of her brain as she plays faster and faster, bow knocking into the wooden bridge and fingers flying to the wrong spots. Wrong note after wrong note, wave after wave of repressed frustration.

 

Bad at living, nothing special, something ordinary. Not good at the violin. Making mistake after mistake.

 

Her breaths are coming fast, now, her brain overtaking itself and shutting down as her eyes flit across measure after measure. The notes begin to blend, her fingers slipping. The violin groans and moans and cries in her hands; she throws herself even further into her playing, forging onwards and ahead as the rain outside picks up. Faster, faster-  _ accelerando.  _ Move faster, think faster, be better.

 

At the height of the piece, when she’s soaring high on a wave of misplaced notes and awkward bowings, when she’s long reaches her breaking point, the D string snaps.

 

“Oh!” Vanya gasps. There’s a metallic  _ twang _ as the useless string flies up and then waves back and forth, back and forth. Her song’s been forcibly killed. The rain keeps falling as Vanya stands alone, in the middle of her apartment, violin still poised on her shoulder and sleeves creeping down over her hands. Her hair’s falling from its bun and bunching around her shoulders. She’s breathing heavily, the sound crushing in the silence.

 

Slowly but surely, the pounding of her heart fills her head.

 

That spurs her into action, pushing her violin back into its case until she can get new strings and clasping it as quickly and loudly as she can. Then she’s off to turn on the television and make it as loud as possible without the neighbors complaining- she needs noise, she needs noise. She needs something other than the sound of her own breathing, of the rain outside, of her eyelids closing over her eyes and her heart beating somewhere in her chest.

 

Vanya does not like the sound of her breathing. Or of her voice, or of her steadily beating heart. She can’t stand the way her body sings in time with itself, how the noises she makes overpowers those of the world, how the way she thinks is circular and overwrought and worn. She’s tired of having to listen to the way she  _ is _ .

 

She lets her head loll to her chest and the sound of the television program wash over her. She’s in her apartment. She’s okay. She’s ordinary, and she’s unremarkable, but she’s  _ in her apartment _ , and she’s  _ okay. _

 

As she slowly but surely calms, she decides that she’ll head to the kitchen and make herself some dinner; then she’ll watch some television before bed.

 

It will  be completely and utterly ordinary. And somewhat useless, and very dull, but Vanya Hargreeves herself is more than somewhat useless and very,  _ very  _ dull, so she thinks that she will be able to manage. 

 

One small, ordinary step at a time.

**Author's Note:**

> Vanya’s my favorite character. I don’t know why, I just like her. I want to do something focusing on each of the other characters too. I’ve already started something on Klaus that focuses on his Hello/Goodbye tattoos for no good reason


End file.
